Be Careful What You Wish For

"Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it". One of those rare cliche aphorisms that's actually concretely and practically useful in every day life.

All of us presumably have experienced a situation in which we desperately sought to escape what we had previously prized. Perhaps we pursued a romance which ended in ruin. Perhaps we prized a job that ultimately claimed our soul.

Like most, though not all, human experiences, being careful what you wish for applies on both micro and macro levels; it is as true for the individual as it is for the group.

Societies, just like individual people, wish for things. Sometimes they get them. And sometimes they wish they hadn't.

Here's an example from World War II, a chapter that even students of that conflict often don't know about. First, an exercise in counter-intuition: what ethnic group suffered the largest scale ethnic cleansing in history, meaning a forced migration from their home of birth?

The Germans. True. As brutally and ruthlessly as Germans uprooted and sometimes exterminated whole tribes of people during the war, the biggest forced migration of a single people happened after the war. And it happened to the Germans.

In a way they could not have foreseen, the Germans got exactly what they wished for: an ethnically segregated Europe.

The Germans (or the Nazis, at least) wished for ethnically pure nations. A biological and physical impossibility, of course, but that's neither here nor there. We often wish for absurdities, do we not?

During the war, the Germans spent a lot of money and men and material killing people and blowing stuff up. Such is the stuff of war. But they spent even MORE money and men and material moving people around Europe, trying in vain to segregate ethnic groups.

Non-Germans were driven out of Germany and German-occupied territories. The goal was a purely German superstate at the heart of Europe with the "lesser races" penned into their own nation-sized ghettos on the periphery.

The Germans lost, as we all know. What most of us don't know is what happened to Germans living in other European nations after the war. They were expelled. All of them.

To be clear, these were not Germans who settled in places only after the German army kicked out the natives. The large majority of Germans driven from their homes had lived in those nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.) for generations.

These people had no part in the sickness that took over Germany; they didn't even live there. But, by virtue of their German blood, they paid for the sins of the Nazis. Thus, it was innocent Germans who were presumed guilty by their very DNA, falling victim to the very ideology that their fellow Germans had foisted upon Europe.

So the Germans got what they wished for: they got an all-German Germany. But it was not an all-powerful superstate spanning the continent; it was a shattered and impoverished rump of its former self, filled with wretched emigrants, and held guilty of the greatest crime in history. But at least they got what they wished for.

What are some examples of this dynamic at play closer to home? One strikes me right away. China.

For decades our government has wished for a non-Communist China at peace with its neighbors and not seeking to spread communist revolution. We have that. But we're not exactly thrilled with it, are we?

Our government got what it wished for in that regard, but now we're paranoid and intimidated by our own wishes having been fulfilled.

How do we know what to wish for? It strikes me that the first step is assessing our motives. Why do we wish for this thing? Is it for the good of the greatest number of people? Or is it for our own self-gratification? These things occasionally coincide. But not often.

If we're wishing for something, we need only be careful if our motives are compromised. I wish people were more careful about what they wished for.